George Barry, picture is a still from the mini-documentary before the feature presentation on the 2004 Death Bed DVD.
George Barry is the John Kennedy Toole of Independent Horror
Cinema. Both writers have one great work
to their name that languished unrecognized for decades, only to take on
unexpected fame years later. Born in
1949 in Royal Oak, a suburb of Detroit, MI, Barry came of age with the late
night double feature. While at Wayne State University Barry began making a
student film known as “Night of the Garbage” about a young man whose garbage
takes over his life and eventually steals his girlfriend. It was never finished and is now lost. But it
laid the ground work for Barry’s only finished film, Death Bed: The Bed That
Eats. Barry ran a successful bookstore: George Barry, Books
for many years that moved to an online platform prior to his retirement. The re-discovery of Death Bed has been a
wonderful journey for Barry, who continues to live in the Royal Oak area where
he raised two children: Darcy & Sean.

Gwenyfar is privileged to manage her family’s iconic independent bookstore, Old Books on Front St., in Wilmington, NC. In 2010 the bookstore’s location was condemned and over 300 people showed up to move them to storage. She is quick to note how powerful that day was for her, “It was like living in the final scene from ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’.” Since 2009 she has enjoyed writing the “Live Local” Column for Encore Magazine, the Cape Fear’s Alternative Newspaper. The column looks at the choices that we make as individuals in our daily lives and the relationship those decisions have to larger economic issues. She is also one of the area’s theatre reviewers for the same publication, a job she dreamed of since she was a child. In 2012 Gwenyfar began recording Classic Literature Commentaries for WHQR Public Radio. “They were inspired by Rexroth’s Classics Revisited but have become something quite different,” she says. In 2013 she began a monthly column for Salt Magazine profiling playwrights. “I made a decision in January of 2013 to focus on more theatre writing, so the column in Salt provides an opportunity to look at the stage through the eyes of a writer rather than a reviewer or audience member. It has been fascinating to talk with different people about how they approach the process.” Like most people, she is working on a novel. In 2013 her novella The Contract Killer, ran as a serial in Encore Magazine. Gwenyfar is developing it into a longer piece that is currently represented by the Belcastro Agency. Even though he has occasionally ended up as a figure of humor in her column, Gwenyfar considers herself the luckiest person on the planet to have shared her adult life with Jock Brandis, the noted humanitarian & inventor (and Death Bed builder). Together they have two dogs, Horace & Hilda Rumpole.